I have a vague childhood memory of being on my daddy’s shoulders as he walked onto a large football field. I remember that the people on the field were all men, and they were all wearing Hawaiian shirts. I think that’s what makes the memory stand out—the Hawaiian shirts. I was surrounded by men in a rainbow of colors, but in the stands was a sea of people in gray and blue.

It wasn’t until I was a freshman marching out onto the very same field that I pieced together the memory and put a name to the place. Only this time, I was not a little girl visiting with her dad—I was a member of the South Carolina Corps of Cadets. When I asked my dad, a ’95 grad, about it, he said that I had gone with him to his five-year reunion. I was only two.

How is it that I ended up at that same place years later, just like my father, in love with the same institution?

My second fixed memory of the campus is when I was a junior in high school visiting The Citadel for homecoming. Homecoming is the biggest weekend of the year to alumni. I had never thought of attending The Citadel. I don’t know exactly when I made the decision during the homecoming football game, but I remember looking up to the far right of the home stands and seeing the knobs standing. Knobs are freshmen—they have to complete fourth-class training to become members of the Corps of Cadets.

“Why on earth,” I asked my dad, “are the knobs standing the entire game?”

“That’s just what they have to do,” he told me.

I remember laughing and thinking to myself that it seemed pretty cool. I guess you might call it my “aha moment,” when I knew I wanted to go to The Citadel.

A year later, I was a high school senior getting ready for college. I signed up to play on the golf team, and I interviewed and was accepted into the Honors Program. In November, I was invited to write a paper and debate with other applicants to compete for academic scholarships. I had the honor of winning a full academic scholarship. On March 22nd, one day before my 18th birthday, a letter came in the mail telling me that I received another scholarship. I had been awarded the college’s most prestigious scholarship—the Star of the West Undergraduate Scholarship. I was stunned, but the biggest kicker was when I started receiving phone calls from the faculty at The Citadel, local news stations and The Post and Courier as well as letters from alumni and past recipients of the scholarship. It was then that I learned I was the first woman in the college’s history to receive this scholarship. I was so humbled to learn that people who had never met me believed in me. My sister said something later that really resonated with me: “The Citadel chose you just as much as you chose it.”

Before I knew it, matriculation day had arrived. On that August day, the incoming freshmen report to their home companies for a week of fourth-class training before the rest of the Corps arrives and classes begin. During matriculation you meet your cadre, the cadets who will be training you, and you meet your classmates—the people who will be there for you and understand what you are going through. They are your companions, and some will become your best friends for life. And while it may sound fun, it was actually scary. Why? Well, because you are one of about 700 others matriculating, and you have to wait in the longest line. Naturally, you start to worry because it is intimidating. You know it’s not the huge welcome party you might experience at a traditional college—it’s a culture shock full of change and rigid rules to mold you into a phenomenal leader, but I was ready.

I found some comfort that day when I met my company commander, AJ Crosby. I had met him before on my pre-knob visit in Charlie Company. A pre-knob visit is an overnight visit for high school students interested in attending The Citadel. It allows you to get a better perspective of cadet life. At my pre-knob visit, I was paired with Rowan Brooks, who became one of my really good friends, and it was then that I met Crosby, who would become my senior mentor.

Just as in life, there are takeaways. The Citadel has a way of making you learn lessons in the oddest but most memorable ways. You’re exposed to leadership and opportunities to lead that you would not find anywhere else. The takeaways throughout my three years so far have a theme because, just as you progress through your academic program, you also progress through a series of life lessons.

Freshman year is the most talked about year because you are a knob, but it is not necessarily the hardest. You simply do what you are told. Freshman year, I found myself. I found my love for biology and the college, and I found my drive to be my best, more than I had ever realized. But the more I strived to be my best, the more I felt that others and I myself found faults with my performance.

My first takeaway—you will never be perfect. When you are a knob, the cadre and upperclassmen are always going to find something wrong with you or your uniform. I was so disappointed in myself when my shoes weren’t top notch, when I had the tiniest crinkle in my uniform—anything. It didn’t matter if the upperclassmen didn’t point it out because I got mad at myself for not meeting the standard. I learned to be confident in my abilities, knowing deep down that I would always try my best. There is no such thing as perfection. Anything can always be done better, but instead of focusing on what you do wrong, focus on what you do right.

A positive attitude carries you a long way through knob year. True strength is knowing that at the end of the day you may not have done something perfectly, but you gave it your best.

Sophomore year has been the hardest year so far. It is vastly different from freshman year because you have much more freedom. You also have to set an example for the knobs, but the hardest part for me was the pressure to perform. I stressed myself out worrying whether I was good enough to be company clerk and battalion clerk and if I was up to the responsibility of leading my classmates, who were very qualified themselves. But people above me believed in me. My cadre squad sergeant from my freshman year, Ben Carminucci, was one of my role models. He believed in me just as Crosby did. It was from these two cadets that I got my next takeaway—not everybody is going to like you.

Naturally, I want people to like me. But sophomore year was when I had to learn that it’s just not possible. Nobody is liked by everybody. All you can do is your best. Know in your heart that you are capable and have a great support team. This lesson expanded upon my lesson from knob year. If I had not learned to believe in my abilities and become aware that perfection is far-fetched, I would not have learned to accept that some people simply would not like me. At the end of the day, the people you want on your side will be on your side. I will never forget Crosby saying to me, “If everybody likes you, you are not doing your job as a leader.”

Junior year was probably the craziest year for me. My classes were more difficult as I got further in my major, and my job in the Corps as regimental administrative NCO was no joke. You reap what you sow—that was the takeaway my junior year. Let me elaborate. I worked hard on my rank my junior year. I also took 21 academic credit hours the first semester and 22 the second. I spent many hours in front of my computer, slaving away on my studies and my work as administrative NCO. There were times when I thought I would not be able to handle both and would fail at one, but I gave it my all and didn’t worry about things I could not control. At the end of it all, my semester grade point average was a 4.0, and I got a chance to interview for regimental commander.

I wanted an opportunity to pursue that position as far back as freshman year. I remember I told my grandfather that was my dream—a shot at becoming regimental commander, and he told me to go for it. The last time I saw him, he was in a hospital room at the Medical University. I was wearing my summer leave uniform when I visited him. I told him that I was doing well and loved The Citadel. He had a tube in his mouth and couldn’t talk, but he smiled and gave me a thumbs up. I like to imagine that he was smiling down on me when I got the email offering me the interview.

The position ultimately went to an outstanding and well-deserving classmate, Ben Snyder. I was named regimental executive officer, and I am excited about what lies in store for the 2020 command team. As I begin my senior year, I know that it too has another takeaway in store for me. Whatever it may be, it will be something that I will be able to carry with me in life.

The Citadel has a way of making people fall in love with its tradition. It allows you to feel like you are a part of something bigger than yourself. You are part of a tradition that strong men and women have carved throughout time. Traditions, new and old, are the lifeblood of the institution, and The Citadel has taught me that you must adapt to change in the world or you become irrelevant.

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Bailey Richardson is a native of Galivants Ferry. A biology major, she was originally assigned to India Company and now serves as the regimental executive officer of the Corps of Cadets, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Corps. She hopes to attend medical school following graduation in May.

I arrived alone at sunset. Campus was still except for a light breeze that carried in the humid smell of marsh. It was August 11, 1995, the day before the Class of 1999 was due to report, and I’d shown up for knob year early on the assumption that a single day—12 hours, really—wouldn’t make a difference. I was wrong.

That morning I’d boarded a flight from upstate New York carrying a lacrosse stick and a duffel bag that was ridiculously and impossibly large—a bag sized beyond any hope or sense of practicality—stuffed with everything an arriving knob was supposed to have, including two pairs of pajamas. I didn’t own pajamas—what 18-year-old does—so the two pair stuffed deep into the shadowy folds of my olive green bag had to be borrowed from my great-grandfather. Well, not exactly borrowed. My great-grandfather, Edwin Schumacher, whose own story intersects with ours just briefly and only on this particular point, had died 14 years earlier, and for some reason my mother had retained his pajamas as a keepsake. Now they’d been crammed in with everything else and then slung into the belly of an American Airlines jet bound for Charleston. The flight was scheduled to last four-and-a-half hours, with a brief layover in Charlotte. The second plane never came.

Rerouted, repurposed—recycled for all I knew—the plane simply vanished, and we were left to wonder when another might be scrambled to rescue us from North Carolina. I paced the terminal, carrying my lacrosse stick and a fresh copy of The Guidon, the pocket-sized publication that contains everything a fourth-class cadet is supposed to know. That summer I’d memorized The Guidon but failed to break in my shoes, which was not only a failure to prioritize, but Exhibit A in long list of exhibits that would have highlighted, had I been paying attention, just how little sense I had of precisely what lay ahead. A family returning from the Caribbean noticed first my lacrosse stick—they found it vaguely exotic—and then, when I stopped to talk, The Guidon. This, they knew. They were from West Ashley,* an area that in 1995—and, frankly, to a lesser extent, even now—was to me a geographical black hole; it sucked in all understanding of place and direction, and returned nothing. They asked what company I was in. This struck me as strange. I paused long enough to show just how strongly I disagreed with their syntax, then explained that as a serious college student I was unemployed and therefore not part of any company at all. We quickly sorted out that in fact I was in a company—F-Troop—which meant I’d be living in second battalion. They knew Padgett-Thomas Barracks as the big one with the clock tower that had old horse stalls buried beneath it. They talked about cadre and hell week and knobs and how cadets were known to climb the Coburg Cow. They kept bringing up Pat Conroy, which made me wonder what the guy who’d written The Prince of Tides had to do with The Citadel.

Eventually, a plane arrived and carried us to Charleston, and this family opened themselves up to me, as so many South Carolina families would over the years. They gave me a ride, they gave me hugs, they gave me their number—I lost it in those chaotic first weeks and never spoke to them again—and then they left me in the shadow of second battalion.

A day early. Academic orientation, one of 99 firsts, wasn’t scheduled to start until the morning, so nobody was expected. Why my parents stuck me on a plane for Charleston without first bothering to check the schedule is a mystery. Why I didn’t double-check myself, however, isn’t—I’m not a details guy. Even now, decades later, if forced to book my own itinerary to hell, I’d probably still arrive, totally by accident, earlier than required. The sophomore on guard, young and skinny and barbarically shaven, met me coolly—no talk of Coburg Cows or Pat Conroy or Whatever Ashley—and asked what company I was in. This time I answered correctly, and a phone call was made. Moments later, a confused F-Troop clerk wandered down. He wore a black cadre t-shirt that clung to his sloped shoulders and stared at me as if I’d just dropped from the sky. He looked at the guard—all but swallowed up under his white summer leave hat—then back to me. “Grab your bag,” was all he said.

Struggling under the enormity of my bag, I spiraled my way up two flights of stairs to what was technically the third floor but—because second battalion has that whole complicated Band thing—was actually considered the second. The clerk threw my door open and said there was a vending machine and a bathroom at the end of the hall but that I probably shouldn’t use either. I should stay in my room, he said, with the door closed and maybe even the light out. He said it wasn’t safe out there for me, which really didn’t make me feel good about being there at all, let alone early. As he turned to go, something on his clipboard caught his eye. He stopped. “Your roommate’s Corps Squad,” he said. I asked what that meant. “Means it’s gonna be a long and lonely week.”

Despite the warnings, I left my door open. It was Charleston. In August. In an old barracks without air conditioning. That room was an oven. The clerk reappeared, this time with a guitar slung over his shoulder. He stood there, a lone minstrel in PT shorts, softly plucking at the strings. I waited but he didn’t say anything. Just stared at me. It was excruciating. And unending. He never blinked, never spoke, never moved anything but his fingers. Finally, I stood and moved slowly across the room to shut the door.

You know what happened from there. The sun rose and the rest of 1999 reported. We spent two days in academic orientation—a bewildering weekend that seemed to serve little purpose other than to drive up the cadre’s desire to tear flesh from our bones. Which they did the following Monday. We learned to brace, we learned to march, we ran laps around campus. A dozen times a week we passed the water tower where someone had painted “Conroy Sucks,” and all I could think was, Man, these guys really hate The Prince of Tides.

Eventually, we were recognized, became sophomores, then juniors and after that we got our rings. We graduated and walked off into a sunset that promised military glory or civilian careers, where we’d become husbands and maybe fathers who looked back—fondly, for the most part—on our time at school and the memories we shared.

At least, that was the plan.

Among the things I didn’t know back in the summer of 1995 was that another incoming knob was about to make a much more momentous arrival than I had. Shannon Faulkner, who’d recently won her two-and-a-half-year legal battle with the school, became the first female cadet to matriculate. She checked herself into the infirmary on the first day of cadre and by week’s end she was gone. The entire Corps was called to McAlister Field House where a member of the administration leaned into the microphone and bellowed, “Gentlemen of the Corps of Cadets… Let me repeat that. Gentlemen of the Corps of Cadets.” Out came the Save the Males bumper stickers and the t-shirts. We were congratulated and toasted and could go nowhere without someone—more often than not a middle-aged woman—leaning in close to whisper that she was glad Faulkner had quit.

Whatever lessons we took from all this unraveled a year later when an even bigger scandal occurred. Suddenly we were antiquated, we were animals—we were the problem. MTV did live feeds from the parade deck. Cadets downtown had drinks thrown in their faces. We were called again to McAlister, not for a congratulatory pep rally—forget what was said last year—but to be scolded. Experts arrived to lecture us on hazing, sensitivity and sexual harassment. Officials from an all-female university were brought in to explain diversity, and one of our classmates stood up and asked, in a surprisingly even tone, “What gives you the right?” Few words could’ve summed up our frustration so sweetly.

But it was in our junior year that all the issues buried back in ’95 finally came to the surface. By then the Class of 1998 had become seniors, and they quickly and loudly planted their flag as the last class. Specifically, the last all-male class. They boasted of being the last to matriculate without women and, with the announcement that Nancy Mace would walk the stage a year early with us, the last to graduate without them as well. They even tried (briefly and unsuccessfully) to be the last class with Summerall Guards.

Theirs was a very specific reaction to the tremendous changes taking place, and it seemed—to many of us in ’99—not only futile, but self-defeating. We had failed to learn from our mistakes in 1995 and couldn’t afford to do it again. We would not spend our senior year grasping at the past when instead we should be looking to the future.

That future was certainly all around us on ring night, where one of the speakers was Brig. Gen. Emory Mace—not only commandant, but Nancy’s father. Gripping the podium, voice breaking, he told us exactly what that ring meant to him and what he’d done to keep it. I’ll let the details of that speech remain in memory, but the essence of what he said was that the principles behind the ring mean something only if the people wearing it carry them forward. In other words, you don’t get to choose your challenges, but you sure as hell get to choose how you deal with them.

I could think of no more apt summation to the unique journey of the Class of 1999.

The following May, that journey ended at McAlister Field House, where—in many ways—it all began. Fears from the administration that we might act out proved unfounded. The class that arrived under fire left with grace.

Recently, I flipped through my copy of the Sphinx, the college yearbook. In it appear letters from both the regimental commander and the senior class president. Both include references to the unique and extraordinary challenges we faced during our time at The Citadel. They were challenges we didn’t choose but nonetheless rose up to meet. As previous classes have attested, the arrival of 1999 marked a break from the past. They can have the last class. We were the class that showed the way, that changed everything, the class that moved beyond what had been and came to exemplify all that would be.

We were the first class. We are 1999. And I wouldn’t change that for anything.

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Kevin Hazzard is the author of A Thousand Naked Strangers, a book that Pat Conroy called a “shocking, utterly compelling tour de force.” His writing has appeared in Atlanta Magazine, Marietta Daily Journal, Creative Loafing, and Paste. Hazzard and his family live in Hermosa Beach, California, where he writes for television.

On September 6, 1966, a young black man from Charleston by the name of Charles DeLesline Foster made history when he broke the color barrier to become the first African American to join the Corps of Cadets. With the end of the Civil War 100 years earlier, the institution of slavery had been abolished, but its effects reverberated throughout the South. Wounds ran deep. Tensions were high. The Confederate flag flew unabashedly while strains of Dixie evoked a bygone era that many preferred to forget. There was little fanfare for the honor graduate from Charles A. Brown High School who had wowed football fans and who had sung in the Sunbeam Choir of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. College officials had asked the media to downplay his arrival. When CBS asked WCSC-TV to interview the cadet-recruit the summer before he matriculated, the local affiliate declined the offer. Except for a smattering of news articles, Foster’s role in the desegregation of The Citadel went unheralded. Foster graduated in 1970, becoming the first of more than 1,200 African American members of the Long Gray Line. In the nearly 50 years since his graduation, his achievement represents an important milestone in the college’s history, and he stands as an inspiration to cadets of all colors about the importance of perseverance.

Halcyon days

Foster was born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Philadelphia on November 26, 1948, to William C. Foster, Sr., and Blanche DeLesline Foster. He was the second of two boys—his brother, William C. Foster, Jr., was 17 months older. His father was a veteran of the Korean War, and his mother was a graduate of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, who would teach high school for 32 years. When Foster was just a toddler, the family moved to Charleston to be near his mother’s family.

After renting a house on Warren Street, the Fosters bought a green-and-white three-story house on Wall Street. It had a porch with a swing, and the two Foster brothers shared an attic bedroom. In the small Eastside community, there was a black grocer, a black bus company and a black dentist.

“Everybody knew everybody,” said Foster’s brother, William, in an oral history interview conducted by The Citadel Archives in June.

The Foster boys played little league baseball and rode their bikes and played marbles with their friends, and like most brothers, they were competitive. “Charles was always a better athlete than I was,” said William. “And when I found out that I was not as good as he was, I turned to music.”

At Emanuel AME Church,* the Foster family had its own pew. After the service, the entire family gathered on Sundays, including the family matriarch, Naomi DeLesline, a graduate of Allen University who, according to William, was reputed to be the first black social worker in Charleston. There was always a big dinner with good food and music, and often the preacher stopped by.

*The Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, commonly referred to as Mother Emmanuel, was founded in 1816. The church was thrust into the national spotlight in 2015 when an armed gunman shot and killed nine congregational members. The killings were classified as a hate crime.

To the west side of town and The Citadel

While the Foster brothers were in middle school, their parents separated and their father returned to Philadelphia. And later, as the city of Charleston was undergoing an urban renewal project, the house on Wall Street was commandeered under eminent domain to build the Gaillard Municipal Auditorium, so the family moved to 171 Fishburne Street on the west side of town, just blocks from The Citadel. Despite the family’s relocation, Foster stayed in school on the east side of town at Charles A. Brown High School, where he was an honor student and an athlete.

“But the one thing that I can say about it, once he made his mind up to do something, he did it.”

William Foster

In the fall of 1965, William was one of only eight black students attending the University of South Carolina, which had been desegregated in the fall of 1963. It was while William was away at school that Foster, a high school senior, began to think about attending The Citadel. The DeLesline women counseled him to pray about his decision. “Nobody planted that seed—no one…. I don’t know where he got the idea from, but that’s something he came up with on his own,” said William, who learned of Foster’s decision during Thanksgiving break. “But the one thing that I can say about it, once he made his mind up to do something, he did it.”

With his brother, his mother and his grandmother at his side and the staunch support of the black community behind him, Foster reported to The Citadel in September of 1966. Two other African American students had been accepted, but Foster was the only one to report. The fourth-class system under normal circumstances is daunting. As the only black cadet, Foster faced an even greater challenge.

Former Board of Visitors chairman Billy Jenkinson, ’68, a trial lawyer from Kingstree, was a junior serving as the Golf Company first sergeant when Foster matriculated. According to Jenkinson, Lt. Col. Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, the assistant commandant of cadets who would later be immortalized as “the Boo” in Pat Conroy’s novel, was determined that Foster would succeed.

“The Boo chose a balanced company for Charles Foster,” said Jenkinson, “and I remember him saying to me, ‘Bubba, you’ve got three instructions: one, give him an ordinary plebe system like he was anybody else; two, make sure that he is not hazed; and, three, if he leaves, you’re gone.’”

David Hooper, ’70, remembers that Foster was sometimes singled out because of the color of his skin. Hooper was Foster’s roommate for part of their freshman year. “He was quiet, but strong—physically strong, but he must have been emotionally strong to go through what he went through,” said Hooper. “There were people who didn’t want him there. He had been accepted, so I accepted him.”

Hooper, who was from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, said that it was not a coincidence that he and Foster were roommates. “I was told that I was selected to be Charlie’s roommate because I was a Yankee, and it would be easier for him to live with a Yankee.”

Dick Bagnal, ’70, roomed with Foster later their freshman year. “He went through the same rigors that we all went through,” said Bagnal. “I’m sure it was more intense. I was a wrestler, and I think that one of the reasons they had me room with him was so that other people wouldn’t mess with him.”

In the middle of his sophomore year, Foster was paired with his final roommate. David Dawson was the son of an Air Force officer whose career had taken his family around the globe. Half a lifetime later, Dawson described an affable relationship with Foster—trips to Dawson’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, and dinners with Foster’s mother at their home on Fishburne Street, where they ate rice, okra and fried chicken or pork chops. There was even an introduction to the black social scene in Charleston. “Charlie would take me to the bars on the Eastside,” said Dawson, “and I can honestly say that was probably my first real exposure to racial conflict, when we would go into these bars, and I was with Charlie, and I was only white person in those bars. I could tell that there were people who did not want me there.”

While Dawson was with Foster, whom he describes as a “tank,” no one bothered him. Foster was “quiet” with “an easygoing disposition.” In the long evening hours, when the two cadets were supposed to be sitting at their desks studying, they sometimes turned the radio on low and listened to beach music—the Tams, the Temptations, the Drifters—and sometimes they talked. “He never really came right out and bragged about it or anything like that. He just said that he had been talked to by the NAACP, some black leaders of the community and The Citadel administration, and he said they convinced him that he would be OK if he came to The Citadel.”

If Foster’s experience was different because he was black, Dawson did not see it. “Charlie never said anything through two-and-a-half years of rooming with me—he never said anything about anybody having a problem of a racial nature…. In retrospect, I would have asked a whole lot more out of curiosity than I did at the time.”

A thorn in the side of the administration

In a June 8, 1967, Charleston Evening Post article, Foster said of his first year, “I wouldn’t take anything in the world for it now. [As] I look back, I can say I enjoyed it. It’s like that competition, you know. You look at the other man and you say, ‘If he can take it, so can I.’ Seems like hard work produces good memories.”

But in 1969, Foster told Larry Ferguson, a fellow Charles A. Brown graduate and a black Citadel freshman, a different story. In high school, Ferguson said that Foster was a big man on campus. He had an easy smile, and he was idolized by the student body. But four years later at The Citadel, Foster, once more a senior, was not the same person. When Foster called Ferguson into his room, the smile was gone. “Don’t let them break you,” Foster told Ferguson. “Don’t let them break you, Larry, because that’s what they tried to do to me. Promise me that.”

Foster’s brother agreed that Foster was changed by his four years at The Citadel. “He was a different person when he got out,” William said. “Charles was kind of a fun-loving—most of the time happy—person. He wasn’t as happy anymore. He was different…. That experience changed him.”

Foster is no longer around to share his story. Sixteen years after he graduated from The Citadel, he died in a house fire in Garland, Texas, so his experience can only be pieced together from archival materials and the accounts of others. Ferguson’s own experience, however, sheds some light on the social climate of those years.

Ferguson matriculated with eight other African American students. “There was a major change going on, and we were part of making that change happen, and we were focused on the fact that we were finally going to have an opportunity to show that we could compete in an integrated environment because our high school was all black. The civil rights movement was coming to a tremendous peak at that time, and Dr. King had just recently been assassinated in 1968, and we just all knew that we were a part of something bigger than us.”

One of the top clarinet players in the state, Ferguson had not planned to attend The Citadel, but when Cornell University offered him a partial scholarship and The Citadel offered him a full scholarship, his father urged him to stay in town and take advantage of the opportunity. Ferguson remembers standing at attention on his first day. He heard racial slurs and the voices of upper-class cadets he could not see ringing out, “There goes another one. Look, there goes another one.”

It was a year full of challenges—challenges because he was a freshman and challenges because he was black. “Every time the football team scored a touchdown, Dixie was played and the rebel flag was waved,” said Ferguson, a member of the regimental band who had no choice but to play the song. As a sophomore, however, Ferguson refused to conform. When he told the band director that he would no longer play Dixie, the band director asked him to pretend to play. Ferguson refused. To pretend would be a lie—an honor violation. And so Ferguson found himself called to the president’s office and moving from Band Company to Charlie Company.

Ferguson’s nonconformist behavior did not stop in Charlie Company. Administrators balked when he and Joe Shine, who matriculated in 1967, asked to form a cadet African American club on campus. But the two black cadets persevered, and the club became a reality, with Ferguson serving as its first president. “In most of my history with The Citadel,” he said, “I was like a rebel, or a thorn in the side of the administration, which I was, but I wasn’t doing it for that purpose.”

Ferguson graduated in 1973, realizing his father’s dream that his son become a Citadel man.  While he was working as a chemist in the automotive industry, Ferguson decided that he wanted to become a dentist, so he returned to The Citadel to take undergraduate classes in biology. The biology department helped him with his application to dental school.  After graduating from the Medical University of South Carolina, he began sharing his Citadel story with prospective African American students around the state. In 1983, just 10 years after he graduated, the Alumni Association named him Citadel Man of the Year. “I went from being a senior private, who, like Foster, The Citadel was glad to get rid of, to being celebrated.”  

In 1989, 20 years after he matriculated, Ferguson was appointed to the Board of Visitors, and it was then that his tenuous relationship with the college began to crumble. As young women fought to gain admission to the military college, old wounds from a segregated era were reopened, and Ferguson found himself at odds with the board and the college. “My mind was going back to a time when I knew the same board was having the same arguments about why black people shouldn’t be there…. And so I walked away.”

Opening doors

While Ferguson was working to go to dental school, Bruce Alexander, a black athlete from Columbus, Georgia, was matriculating. The year was 1978, only eight years after Charles Foster’s graduation. Foster’s name had already been forgotten. “Most of us didn’t even realize that the first black graduate was in 1970,” said Alexander, who is the vice president of communications for a nonprofit organization that provides transitional housing for military families. “It wasn’t a part of our history classes or anything.”

In 1982, when Alexander graduated, he became the 76th African American alumnus. A year later, African American alumni numbered 100. Change was slow to come, but doors were beginning to open, and in 1998 an African American alumni reunion committee was trying to put together an event in Charles Foster’s name. That’s when Alexander learned of Foster and his importance in Citadel history. Through the committee’s efforts, the first Charles D. Foster Scholarship was endowed. Today Alexander is the president of The Citadel African American Alumni Association, and African Americans number more than 1,200 in the ranks of Citadel alumni.

“It speaks volumes when you go from not even acknowledging your black cadets and graduates to raising them up and recognizing them and their accomplishments. And the fact that the college is supportive of the programs and kids that are attending means the world not only to the alumni but to the parents.”

A new day

Fifty years after Charles Foster matriculated, Larry Ferguson sat at his desk in his dental office reading the morning news, just like any other morning. When he flipped to the sports section, a headline stopped him in his tracks. “Citadel to honor Charles Foster, first black graduate, at homecoming.”

Ferguson picked up the phone and made a call. Three days later, he walked through the doors of the Greater Issues Room, where The Citadel African American Alumni Association was holding a special homecoming meeting. Foster’s legacy stood proudly before him—a shining sea of African American alumni, their energy and their enthusiasm palpable. Foster’s struggles—and Ferguson’s own struggles—had paid off. It was a new day at The Citadel. Tears filled his eyes.

As Ferguson entered the room, Bruce Alexander stopped the meeting. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I’d like to introduce you to someone very special.”

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A note from the Editor

Charles Foster’s contribution to the success of The Citadel cannot be overstated. His untimely death in 1986, the scant news coverage and the limited archival records from that time made this a challenging piece to write. We interviewed more than a dozen people to piece together his life and his legacy. This is an important story for The Citadel, and the search for stories and photographs continues through the Archives and Museum at citadel.edu/CharlesFosterProject.

In the annals of Citadel history, Charles Foster’s story is one of strength and determination. May 2020 will mark the 50-year anniversary of his graduation, and today cadets and alumni continue to celebrate his achievement. We sat down with some of them to find out what his story means to them. Read more here.